Nonlinear coherent destruction of tunneling

Abstract

We study theoretically two coupled periodically-curved optical waveguides with Kerr nonlinearity. We find that the tunneling between the waveguides can be suppressed in a wide range of parameters due to nonlinearity. Such suppression of tunneling is different from the coherent destruction of tunneling in a linear medium, which occurs only at the isolated degeneracy point of the quasienergies. We call this novel suppression nonlinear coherent destruction of tunneling.